Don’t be alarmed. People come to this site with a variety of beliefs, to which they are entitled. I have no intention of preaching.

But Easter is here again. In SoCal it’s nothing like the major event—which came with a sense of everything having been made new again—that I dimly recall from Easters long ago in Carolina. Still, the kids in our house are charged up. And I find myself pondering a phase in my life that’s covered in the latter chapters of WATB.

There came a point in the early 90s when our family’s confidence reached a very low ebb. The treatment program that had helped our son Joseph overcome some of his disabilities was no longer working. His mother and I had been pushing harder and harder to make it work again, and we were breaking, in every sense.

I saw myself, in those days, as the prodigal son, who’d set forth to achieve something on his own and instead found himself in the pigpen of life.

Judy helped me view our situation in those terms because, following an unexpected conversion experience, she’d reached the conclusion that there was another, far better way. With her lead, we sought guidance from people who taught that healing and fulfillment of all good desires was available thanks to the sacrifice made at the first Easter.

If the written account is taken literally, Jesus demonstrated many times that it is God’s will for people to live free from disease and disability. The first obstacle to enjoying that blessing, we learned, was simply ignorance of it. The second obstacle was failure to understand that believers have the right to it. Beyond that—and I’m paraphrasing and simplifying like crazy, on top of my very imperfect memory and understanding—success is a matter of activating divine power through faith. What is required on the part of the receiver, they taught, is not mere hope, and not an intellectual understanding, but an inner conviction that what has been prayed for is already true, regardless of appearances. Faith, we read, is “the evidence of things not seen.”

Just as belief in the therapy program had previously sustained us, this new faith removed much of the anxiety that had returned to cloud our lives.

Now, in view of what happened subsequently, conclusions might be drawn concerning the truth of the scriptures, or the merit of the teachers we had, or our own capacity. Various people I’m acquainted with would opt for one or another of those explanations. I’m inclined toward the second, but as I say in the book, the whole subject seems to be beyond anyone’s understanding. Like Judy, I had personal moments of fleeting contact with something greater than myself. But I cannot claim any enlightenment as a result. What Easter represents transcends anything manmade, certainly including religion.

Which kinda leaves me in the lurch when it comes to talking about it with the young ones.

Tags: transcendence

This entry was posted on April 24th, 2011 and is filed under healing, random thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.